Page 38 of The Alpha's Gamble
“Anything else, Mr. Castelli?”
I startled and looked up sharply from my phone at the smiling waitress hovering over my table with a pot of coffee in her hand. I’d been miles away.
Decades away, more accurately. I’d found a website run by some insane Las Vegas historian with pages on each casino in the city, and I’d been halfway through a long essay on the Morrigan. Apparently Declan’s paternal grandparents had immigrated from Ireland in the forties, with a large sum of money that the writer had no explanation for, and built the Morrigan from the ground up. Mob involvement and skeletons—both figurative and literal—were heavily hinted at. The fact that the damn writer kept talking about construction costs and issues with cement instead of going back to the mafia and the potential murders only had me more on the edge of my seat, albeit frustrated to the point of tearing out my hair.
Thiswas Declan’s background? For fuck’s sake. And I hadn’t even gotten to his parents yet, or to the part that interested me most: how Declan had ended up getting the Morrigan back. It made my family look normal.
“You can keep the coffee coming,” I said, and reluctantly put the phone down so I could move my coffee cup into range of the pot.
Behind her, a group of laughing college-age guys passed by the entrance to the diner, which opened onto the casino floor. I watched them go by a little wistfully. For a second, as they moved out of sight, my eyes met those of a nondescript blond guy sitting at a slot machine almost directly across from the diner, one of the taller machines set in a cluster of three or four in a little circle. He instantly turned his back to me and bent over the screen, posture stiff.
Okay. Well, I wasn’t his type? The feeling was mutual, buddy. Or maybe he thought I’d caught him ogling the waitress. Or the college guys.
But when the waitress had finished pouring my coffee and wiping up a small spill, departing the table with another smile, something felt…off. I glanced up from my phone without moving my head. The guy had half-turned again, a hand still on the slot machine but his attention clearly focused my way. And this time, there weren’t any attractive women or cute college boys in between.
Maybe there was something interesting behind me. I forced myself to go back to the article I’d been reading, managing to make it through to where Declan’s parents went bankrupt, as I’d speculated they probably had. I had to scroll back up again when I realized I hadn’t given my full attention to anything I’d skimmed. Cocaine? Bad investments? Maybe both. They sounded nearly as awesome as my parents, either way.
Another glance up. The guy was still watching me. Or was he? He’d focused his gaze past my head again, but I truly didn’t have anything behind me except for a couple of other people eating pancakes.
The back of my neck tingled and my fingers twitched. He probably hadn’t noticed that I’d noticed, but that didn’t make it any better to have someone staring at me. Shit. Who’d be watching me? Had Declan assigned someone to keep tabs on me? But why the fuck would he? The Morrigan had cameras everywhere, plus I was always within eyeshot of an employee simply by the nature of how casinos were staffed. And this guy didn’t look like someone you’d hire to watch your fuck toy, either. He had on khaki pants and a quiet plaid button down, like someone who worked in an informal office setting. Clean shaven. Boring shoes.
I took a sip of my coffee and pulled up a text message, entering Declan’s contact and then hesitating. His note had made it pretty clear he didn’t want to hear from me, but… Okay, so Walter had attacked me. I knew it, even if Declan wouldn’t admit it. And now I had someone spying on me.
Two possibilities. One: Walter, and this guy, or possibly this guy on behalf of Walter, had it out for me because of Declan and thought they were helping him. Two: They had it out for Declan, and I was just a target because I was close to him.
Either way, it was Declan’s problem, right? Because Declan had made me his problem. And I might be an alpha werewolf and everything, but that didn’t mean I wanted to deal with this bullshit on my own.
I sent him a message telling him where I was and about the guy watching me, and I encouraged him to look at the security feed to see for himself. Brief and dry. No emotion, and no mention of Walter. After hitting send, I tried to soothe the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach with more coffee, instantly regretting it. Too bad the restaurant didn’t offer antacids as a side dish.
Reading more about the Morrigan was out, no matter how much I wanted to know what happened between Declan’s parents’ coke-fueled stock market shenanigans and Declan buying the place back. I simply couldn’t focus, and I ended up scrolling random news sites to look busy. Declan didn’t message back, the guy kept eyeing me in between poking at the screen on his slot machine, and my coffee got cold.
Fuck this. Part of me took sour pleasure in imagining how bored and annoyed my stalker had to be, sitting there forever while I did nothing but toy with a cup of coffee, but fuck this anyway. He clearly had a lot more patience than I did. I made a mental note: when Declan eventually let me go, I could cross private investigator off my list of potential money-making possibilities.
I’d already signed the bill, so I got up, stuck my phone in my pocket, and sauntered out of the diner, hopefully looking a lot more casual than I felt. If this douchebag wanted to watch me, I’d at least walk around and make him work for it a bit.
On a—shit, I had no idea, and I had to pull my phone out to check—Tuesday morning, okay, Tuesday, I’d lost track of time completely, the casino wasn’t exactly bustling. But the Morrigan attracted a certain type of local regular, people who had scheduled times during the week to go and sit at their favorite machines. I almost could’ve taken my stalker for one of them, someone who had a standing lunch break date with a cartoon lobster who liked to take his money while yelling cheerful advice, if I hadn’t happened to catch him staring. Tourists weren’t the Morrigan’s bread and butter, unless you counted groups like that bridal party on a budget I’d seen the other night. That older woman there, eyes fixed avidly on a series of little oil wells spurting out gold coins. She kept this place open on a daily basis.
Since I’d charged my breakfast to Declan’s suite, I still had that hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket. Tuesday morning. Not exactly time for the high rollers to be out, and the Morrigan was on the lower-end side to begin with. After leaving the slots, I spent ten minutes cruising around the card tables until I found a likely-looking five-dollar blackjack table. Two other players, acceptable. Observing them for a couple of minutes told me they were playing close enough to correctly not to fuck up my game too badly.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and opened up the camera, setting it to selfie mode. Not too discreet, but hopefully the guy watching me didn’t have supernatural eyesight; I hadn’t gotten close enough to scent him properly, and the casino’s super ventilation system cleared out smells quickly, but I hadn’t had so much as a whiff of anything magical or shifter from his direction. A quick scan behind me, tilting the phone to give me a view past each shoulder, showed me that Mr. Khakis had wandered over to observe a roulette table. That left me in his line of vision. Accident? I didn’t think so.
Okay. Fine. I’d bore him by playing blackjack for a while, and maybe Declan would get his head out of his ass long enough to check the security cameras and verify my story.
Or maybe my playing blackjack would irritate Declan enough that he’d look more closely. Win win.
I took my seat at the end of the table, bought my chips and greeted the no-nonsense middle-aged woman dealing, nodded hello to the two guys at the other end, and started to play.
It’d been years—no, scratch that. I’d never played blackjack with a budget, or for such low stakes. And that made this unexpectedly fun and absorbing. Turning a few grand into a few grand more, or into zero, wasn’t all that exciting. But playing five dollars at a time, with a limit of twenty hands if I lost them all? That got my blood pumping. It was a challenge.
After a few hands, I’d totally forgotten about my stalker, about Declan, about Walter. About anything except my absorption in the small pile of chips in front of me and in keeping track of the likelihood of the next card being what I needed to make the pile a little larger.
And it got larger. Slowly, bit by bit, with a dip down to thirty-five dollars in chips that had my heart racing way out of proportion to the loss. I mean, this was my fuck-toy spending money. Losing it meant nothing, aside from the fact that a hundred dollars was nothing in general. But when I got up to a hundred again I had to resist the urge to pump my fist in the air and whoop. And when the dealer started a new shoe and whole slew of small cards came out in the first few hands, hardly a high card in sight, I had to suppress a grin of triumph.
Playing that shoe, I more than doubled my money. Two splits and then a double down right at the end had me at two hundred and sixty.
The old me would’ve put it all on one hand, sucked down the last of my drink, and then gone to find someone to fuck.
But this time…I’d done something that I, Blake Castelli, disdainer of business and a hard day’s work, had never done before: turned an honest profit. Well, mostly honest. I’d been counting cards.
